Review of Star Trek Beyond (2016) by Skd — 03 Aug 2016

Thankfully, this movie was not as bad as Star Trek Into Darkness. It wasn't so obsessed with saluting an older, better movie (unlike the past two Abrams flicks) that it was able to branch out and create it's own story in the Star Trek universe. Still, some pitfalls remain.

First, what it did well:

This movie provided a solid, entertaining lazy summer flick. The special effects were good. The story was okay (minus the plot holes listed below). And the acting was adequate. It didn't knock things out of the park, but it checked all the boxes to provide a passable movie experience.

I thought the movie did a good job capturing the emotions of the main characters. Kirk is reflecting on the fact that he is now a year older than his dad ever was. Spock is confronting his mortality as his alternate reality self dies (a tribute to Leonard Nimoy). The tension in these short scenes is real, although unfortunately it is never tied together in a conclusion. They don't resolve the conflicts with their inner demons, so these moments end up being space fillers.

What it did bad:

Character development. Character development. Character development. I can't harp on this enough. Not for the Enterprise crew, we know them after three movies. For the new characters that were introduced. At the end of the movie, we still know absolutely nothing about them. "Lassie" for example (I don't even know her actual name, that's how weak the character development was). The only thing I know about her is that her father died getting her out of the prison, and yet she's popping corks with Kirk at the end of the movie like all the backstory on her is cemented.

The villain: character development was very weak on him as well. We never got a sense of what he wanted to achieve, or why he was doing what he was doing. Abrams also has this bad habit of trying to rush in a major surprise 15 mins before the credits roll, and he usually does it in a very sloppy way. Uhura walks past a monitor and realizes the bad guy alien is really a century old Federation Captain? Yeah right. So let me get this straight, he crash lands on this planet, somehow lives to the age of 150 and turns into an alien, creates a new crew of shock troops with alien techno-wank (everything from energy phasers to swarm ships capable of taking down the Enterprise) and he wants to destroy the federation base for...reasons. None of this is ever explained.

And then, at the climax of the battle with the alien swarm, we need to easy button to get our heroes out of the massive attack that the alien launches on the station. Solution: they just play the radio at full blast and the swarm dies. No really, that's what they did. VHF causes the networked drones to blow up? Maybe if they were playing Nickelback.

Also, that motorcycle. No way in hell it would run after sitting there for 150 years. The gas alone would have gone bad. The Jurrasic World jeeps had a better chance.